Giovanni GiovannettiDavid Foster Wallace, in an undated photo, told a 2005 Kenyon College commencement class that true freedom means "being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

By Gabriel Brownstein

In September 2008, David Foster Wallace hung himself on the patio of his house in Claremont, Calif. He left behind in the garage that he used as an office hundreds and hundreds of pages of work toward a novel.

According to Wallace's longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, there were "hard drives, file folders, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks . . . printed chapters, sheaves of handwritten pages, and more." Pietsch flew to California at the invitation of Wallace's wife, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadel, and returned to New York with "a green duffel bag and two Trader Joe's bags heavy with manuscripts."

From this Pietsch assembled, as he explains in his loving introduction, what is being published as "The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel." Pietsch's editing has preserved the sense of a manuscript box, lots of brilliant snippets leaping out to surprise you, but he has also shaped the work sufficiently to suggest the outlines of an ambitious, provocative and profound novel.

The structure recalls Wallace's 1996 "Infinite Jest," a series of chapters and vignettes and rhetorical games, under which lurks a complex and murky plot. The new novel's conceit is that in 1984, young Wallace got kicked out of college and was forced to work for the I.R.S.

In an "Author's Forward" that shows up some 70-odd pages into the book -- "Author here," Wallace writes, by way of "Call me Ishmael" -- he says "you will regard features like shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities, & c. as simply the modern literary analogs of 'once upon a time.' "

But it's all (so he claims) a thin disguise; this is a true story, or so he insists.

In the way that "Moby-Dick" was a comprehensive book about whaling, "The Pale King"sets out to be a comprehensive book about tax processing. It endeavors to capture, as if firsthand, the work of the IRS in all of its enormous detail. This is a project of mind-boggling ambition because, as the book points out, the tax code has its tentacles in every corner of American life, and because the work that tax collectors do is so very, very boring.

The book is fascinated by boredom, by dullness. "Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain," Wallace writes, "because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling."

So, you're thinking: a 500-page discontinuous novel about boredom and tax collecting by a man so depressed he killed himself in the middle of writing it, and yet this book reminds us of all we lost when we lost Wallace. He mocks the workplace language of the tax processors with dark precision: the "wigglers" who sit at their "tingles" with the rubber protectors on their pinkies as the "cart boys" pass with their squeaky wheels.

Stuff does happen -- the tax collectors get haunted by ghosts, they go out to bars, they recount their awful childhoods and the way they came to their positions, and Wallace writes funny, little, darkly grotesque horror stories about their backgrounds and lives. He runs through the whole repertoire of his invented forms -- the footnotes, the monologues, the Q and A. The prose is frequently drop-dead gorgeous.

The Pale King, Little, Brown, 548 pp., $27.99

And underneath runs a powerful subversion, taking on hipsters and conservatives alike: that tax collectors are heroes. They face boredom every day, which is akin to facing death. Their work is what holds our country together; without them we'd have no government at all.

"Gentlemen," one character says during an accounting lecture, "here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is."

My sense is that we have only a fragment. Perhaps Wallace was going for something truly massive, with an even larger scope than the 1,000-page plus "Infinite Jest." What we get in this book is just the arrival of young Wallace and other recent hires (GS-9s) at the tax-processing center (REC) in Peoria, Ill., and 500-plus pages in, we await the entrance of the group's genius leader, Dr. Merrill Errol Lehrl.

Maybe in the novel's full conception, Dr. Lehrl would have shaped this motley crew into something that might have possibly . . . or maybe not. We cannot know.

My reading was haunted by a terrible feeling of sadness and loss. But also I felt joy, and I felt wonder. Here was a great and serious artist -- a man of unending invention, ambition, intelligence and wit.

Gabriel Brownstein is the author of the novel "The Man From Beyond" and teaches at St. John University in Queens, N.Y.

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